program*

* small changes may occur

Lecture #1: "Decoding Interactive Writing"(Lynda Clark), Institut Français - SofiaWriters from the more conventional and traditional creative practices often feel overwhelmed or intimidated by writing for interactive forms. How do you write a story where the reader is an active participant? How do you create digital interactivity if you don’t know how to code? Looking back over the history of video games shows that the techniques used in many modern games grew out of simpler textual forms. Tracing these forms through to modern day video games, we can use them to inspire and form our own creative work while realising that although there are differences, none are insurmountable. Modern authoring tools allow those with no coding skills to develop complex interactive stories and provide opportunities for writers to share their work with new audiences.

Lecture #2: "To Die Out Laughing" (Marko Stamenkovic), House of Humour and Satire - GabrovoIf curatorial practice, in a theoretical and an empirical sense, has the potential to invoke neglected or overlooked aspects of human existence (which has been one of the central tenets in my work so far), then it is also able to expand the limits of our awareness about what is conventionally unknown, unspeakable, or unpresentable. My central interest in this regard revolves around the many ways we think about human life in contemporary society, but also about death and mortality in the global context, which has become inextricably linked to the political rationality of image-making and the strategic role played by visual communication at large. Accordingly, my own understanding of the act of curating – in the sense of shedding light onto the darker side of sovereign epistemic displays – continually adjusts itself to the processes of 'exhibiting': showing what is otherwise underrepresented and kept below the radar of normative visuality by dominant (masculine, patriarchal, white-minded, Euro-centric, colonial, racist and sexist) forces of our knowledge-worlds.

Lecture #3: "Turning Scientific Ideas into Emotions" (Andrea Brunello), House of Humour and Satire - GabrovoWe live in a world that is dominated and profoundly shaped by science. Over the past few hundred years, science has allowed our societies to truly flourish. Over the past few decades, scientific discoveries have reached a level of extreme sophistication that is truly baffling. Yet, we often have the feeling that science is something far removed and detached from us, something cold and foreign. This might be because science narratives often end up sounding somewhat technical and boring or getting shaped into unbelievable science fiction. Whatever the reasons may be, many of us have a hard time recognizing the impact that real scientific ideas have on our existence. Yet quantum mechanics, relativity, astrophysics, particle physics, genetic engineering, and neuroscience (to mention just a few) have profoundly and forever shaped the way we look at the world. So, how can we turn the narration of science into something truly exciting and inspiring, something with a high emotional impact?Taking inspiration from giants like Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and others, in this lecture I will explore how we can set up a narrative based on real scientific ideas and how these can be turned into existential issues, themes that have a deep impact on our spiritual as well as on our practical existence. The final objective will be to go from science to “emotion.” This lecture can be useful to teachers, writers, playwrights, people who seek to popularize science, and whomever desires a more wondrous approach to the narration of science.

Lecture #4: „Storywalker-a new theatrical experience" (Fernando Sánchez-Cabezudo), House of Humour and Satire - Gabrovo“Storywalker“ is a new mobile cultural experience, containing geolocalized audio fictions. “Storywalker” is a new concept, a new format where creative boundaries between artistic disciplines are blurred and expanded. Stories told by the citizens are used as a starting point, from which the whole creative process of storytelling begins. This process generates a new means of creation, which uses different media and languages. It is based on the premise that great stories are contained in the things and people we encounter on a daily basis, Public spaces, squares, bars, and meeting places are the scenes of this new cultural experience.

Lecture #5: "​Emancipation And Establishment In Bulgarian Contemporary Dance" (Ani Vaseva), Bozhentsi old schoolUnlimited experimentation territory – this phrase is often used like a slogan of the contemporary dance scene. And yet there is so much tension within the field of contemporary dance, which often explodes with the clashes of the possible answers of fundamental questions like: what is contemporary dance? Who can and can’t dance it? Who can and can’t choreograph it? And through the complex processes of constant negotiation and/or warfare emerge the fragile and contradictory concepts with which we try to navigate around the landscape. In Bulgaria, as in most countries, the processes of emancipation of a separate field (with problematic borders and definitions) called “contemporary dance” is inseparably bound with the counter processes of establishing infrastructure, institutions and inevitably – “mainstream”. The lecture will try to shed light on those processes in the Bulgarian dance scene from the last few decades.

Workshop #1: "The Playwright’s Toolkit"​ (Sarah Grochala), BozhentsiHow do you write a play that engages your audience and takes them on a journey that they will never forget? This workshop will explore the structures of story and offer practical tools for constructing engaging and exhilarating dramatic narratives. In our postmodern/postdramatic times, story - like the Buzludzha monument - is often seen as an out-dated relic of times past. A left-over from a time when we imagine that ideologies and identities were clearer and the world seemed a more solid and comprehensible place. This workshop will argue that the structures of story as relevant and as necessary today as they have ever been. It will cover the basics of story including dramatic action, scene structure, plot structure, character development, dramatic worlds and integrating theme. It will also look at the ways in which the traditional structures of story are being re-invented and re-thought in our digitised and globalised world of hyperlinked, multi-perspective and fragmented narratives.

Workshop #2:"Physical approach to writing" (Katharina Maschenka Horn),BozhentsiIn the workshop Katharina and the workshop participants will deal with a physical approach to writing, as a way of including not just the mind, but also the body in the writing process.This workshop will closely collaborate with the other workshops at this year's summer scriptwriting base, in an attempt to provide the workshop participants with a variety of physical tools, including others warm-up exercises to engage the body before writing, building awareness of the breathing system to engage the body, as well as putting the body in different states during the writing process to achieve a different writing experience. Katharina will work with the workshop participants in a group as well as individually, depending on the participants’ specific needs and interests.

Workshop #3: "Buzludzha is not exactly an empty roosted can - Video postcards for the future" (Elitza Guerguieva), BozhentsiThis video workshop will have as a starting point a departure from reality, which will lead us to something unknown and even absurd. In the beginning, we will go through some filmed material, which is akin to a documentary, a fiction, and performances that could become inspirational sources for the opening up of prospects for an audiovisual narrative. In a second scoop, we will follow a camera wandering around Bozhentsi’s neighborhoods and especially the Buzludzha Monument. This huge monument, built in the tradition of Oscar Nemeyer, resembles a flying saucer or, if you are America, a hamburger. With its vast congress hall, surrounded by a circular balcony, this is a now discredited monument of the Communist Party. By climbing aboard this cosmic saucer, we will travel back in time to the Communist era. We will show strange postcards and imagine epistolary texts that each participant could send to a friend or just to an alien. In the follow-up, we will visit these same places with our camera in hand in order to shoot our own material. What kind of narrative could be envisaged to match these abstract images, this absurd landscape? The text could then become the engine behind the filmed sequences and/or drift to a poetry made up purely of vision and sound. Another possibility is to express our impressions through a dialogue with a voice over in the aftermath. We will proceed with our collective arguments, exploring these different prospects. How to build up a visual narrative that blends texts and images? How to bring humor to such places that at first sight appear sad or drab?The creation of these video postcards is a way to rerun the past seen as a collective memory yet to be free from the obligation to stick to reality or what is “serious.” What can we find as a reflection of our decrepit past? What could we make from these abandoned sites left by their past ghosts?

Concert (part of the closing festival, 9.08.2017), Bozhentsi:Tui Mamaki: comes from New Zealand and fell in love with Bulgaria and Bulgarian traditional music. Her music is an interesting fusion of influences from all around the world. Here you can listen some of her recordings.Kottarashky & The Rain Dogs: Kottarashky (Nikola Gruev)is a musician and composer who fuses authentic recordings taken in his native Bulgaria, with electronic music, hip-hop, jazzand many other music genres. He personally defines his style as “Balkan psychedelic”, but the critics consider him as a phenomenon in the balkan beat wave due to his original approach in creating music. In November 2009 the German label Asphalt Tango Records released Kottarashky’s debut album “Opa Hey”. A few months later he founded the band Kottarashky & The Rain Dogs. In 2012 they released together his second album “Demoni” under the same label. The concert of Kottarashky & The Rain Dogs will be with a special surprise guest. Listen.